Impact of Agarose Hydrogels as Cell Vehicles for Neo Retinal Pigment Epithelium Formation: In Vitro Study

Retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) which plays a key role of the visual function is destroyed by retinal diseases, which are affected to visual impairment or blindness. Agarose (Agr) prepared from Marine red algae is a thermo-reversible biopolymer and applied to variable tissue regeneration study due to its biocompatibility. However, Agr-based RPE tissue engineering study hasn’t been reported. The purpose of this study is verification regarding applicability of Agr hydrogels for RPE regeneration. Agr hydrogels with different amounts of Agr were prepared, there were no significant differences of the results regarding chemical composition with the amounts of Agr. On the other hands, increasing the amounts of Agr in hydrogels were affected to pore size, degradation, swelling, compressive strength and porosity due to the differences of physical cross-linking. From in vitro test, RPE cells were well attached on the surface of Agr hydrogels regardless of the amounts of Agr. Furthermore, cell proliferation and RPE-specific gene expression were highly influenced with high amounts of Agr in the hydrogels. It was considered that these results in this study was related to stiffness difference of hydrogels. Agr hydrogels could be promising scaffolds for RPE tissue regeneration progressed by the tissue engineering technique. [Figure not available: see fulltext.].